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Saturday, April 24, 2010

Wrapping Up Journey North

Yesterday we submitted our answers to where we think the 10 mystery classes are around the globe. We'll be starting a new earth science project next week.

We did fairly well finding our locations, except for one--class #10, for which a math error caused some pretty interesting rabbit trails. We thought it was somewhere in central Asia between India and China. When we got to the clue about the prefecture being on a peninsula, we were baffled. We did find that the Kunming Wujiaba airport was located in Yunnan Prefecture, which is shaped like a peninsula only it juts into another country instead of into water. The funniest thing is that this airport is being replaced with a larger one called Kunming Zheng He International Airport. Well, this same student also had Mystery Class #5 and that same week he had to find out about the Zheng He statue in Malaysia--we thought for sure we were on the right track!

The final clue had to do with a monument to a shipwreck on the peninsula, so we knew something had to be wrong. I looked again at the calculation sheet for the longitude. Sunrise on the equinox was 6:03 UT and was at 20:42 UT the day before, and for some reason I wrote the difference to be only 5 hours and 21 minutes!!! Why, I have no idea, but what a difference 4 hours make. The class was in Japan and not central Asia and after a bit of searching we eventually found the place to match the clues (at least we'll see if we did on May 7th.)

1 comment:

We are almost done with our mystery classes. I split the 10 classes up between my two boys. My older boy had MC#10 and after getting the second clue, something didn't seem right. His original guess had been Guam. A re-checking of his original data showed him that he had miscalculated his daylight time.

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